A Cup of Normal

  Looking good, Lib, she thought.

  Gary wasn’t kidding: this stuff was concentrated. A little Normal had taken care of the entire house and there was still a tablespoon at the bottom of the cup. Enough to handle the living room.

  Libby strolled down the nice even hallway into the living room, the cup hidden safely behind her back.

  “There you are,” Fibritus said with obvious relief as she entered the room.

  Libby stopped short, staring at the woman he’d brought to their house.

  “Your mother?” Libby sputtered. “The investor is your mother?”

  Fabritus’s mother, Andrea, perched on the edge of the overstuffed blue gingham couch, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap, as if trying to touch as little of the room as possible. Her perfect fake black hair was cut in the newest wedge style and made her look ten years younger in her tailored jacket and fitted skirt.

  “Libby,” she said through a clenched smile that made her look ten years meaner, “we were just talking about you.”

  Libby put on her own fake smile and waded through jungle grass to the couch. “So good to see you, Andrea,” she said throwing Fabritus a panicked look.

  He just gave her that we’ll-talk-later eyebrow raise.

  “I know most people don’t like to mix business with blood,” he said, “and usually I agree. But I truly do believe our grand vision of the future and our grand invention is more than qualified for the money Dad put aside for me when he passed away.”

  “It’s grisly how you harp on about that money,” Andrea said. “Why he’s barely been gone a day.”

  “He’s been dead fifteen years, Mom,” Fabritus said, “and I’ve only asked about the money once: last week when I offered for you to come out here to see what Libby and I have done.”

  “Shacked up in an uninhabitable hovel?” Andrea asked. “That hardly takes genius.”

  While they were busy glaring at each other, Libby quietly pulled the cup out from behind her back and tipped it toward the floor.

  “No,” Fabritus said, “we’ve changed the uninhabitable vortex neighborhood into a comfortable, if occasionally adventurous, living space.”

  “There is nothing adventurous about swamp grass in your living room and a herd of giraffe appearing in your den,” she said. “That’s just unsanitary.”

  “There have been no manifestation of giraffe,” he said. “It’s quantum reality overlay. We have parameters set on the gyro. Overlays can not cause physical harm.”

  Just then the alarm clock winked back into existence, falling through the living room ceiling hard and fast. It dropped like a clanging rocket, aimed straight at Libby’s head.

  Oh, crap.

  Libby threw her free hand up to block her face. The alarm struck her wrist, knocked the cup out of her hand, and spilled fine brown Normal all over her mother-in-law.

  “Ouch!” Libby shook her wrist and bit her lip so she didn’t say any other less appropriate four-letter words.

  Andrea shrieked and shuddered as if she’d just been hosed down by offal instead of a little dust, then began sneezing uncontrollably.

  Fabritus was on his feet, but didn’t seem to know which woman to console.

  Libby pointed at his mother with her good hand. But to her surprise, he took a step toward her.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded.

  “You threw dirt at my mother.”

  “It isn’t dirt, it’s Normal. The salesman —”

  “Salesman? Here?”

  “— knocked on the front door. He said this, this Normal would fix everything it touched.”

  “You believed him?”

  “I thought it was worth a try.”

  As one, they turned and looked at Andrea. She didn’t appear any different, although the wine stain on the couch arm was gone and the painting on the wall behind her had swung level with the ceiling line.

  “Amazing,” Fabritus breathed. “What’s in that stuff?”

  “I have no idea. But I do have his card.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Andrea pointed her finger at Libby. “Look at me! Look at what you did to me, you stupid, clumsy waste.”

  Apparently, this was Andrea’s normal. Terrific.

  Here it goes, Libby thought. All our dreams undone.

  “I don’t know what kind of charade you are trying to pull here, Fabritus,” Andrea shouted, “but I do not approve of this house, then venture, or that — that excuse of a wife. You will get no money from me.”

  “Mother,” Fabritus said.

  “Don’t ‘mother’ me.” She tried to dust off her jacket but only ground the dirt deeper into the fabric. “You are too good for her. You have always been too good for her. She is so beneath you.”

  And there it was: the truth. Libby had wondered when his mother would finally tell him what she had been telling her for the last year. That Libby wasn’t good enough, smart enough, rich enough for her son.

  “Mother.” Fabritus was so quiet, even Libby looked over at him. “I thought bringing you here to see the amazing home Libby and I have built together would change your mind, but I see I was wrong. Let me make one thing clear — that isn’t your money, it’s mine. Left to me by my father. If you refuse to work with us, then I will bring our lawyers into this.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would. And they will follow his requests down to every last word.”

  Libby had never read his father’s will, but from the look on Fabritus’s face, following his every last word wasn’t going to go in Andrea’s favor.

  “I can’t believe you would be so stubborn and cross about this stupid . . . notion of yours.”

  “Revolutionary ideas almost always begin as stupid notions.”

  Libby grinned. Gary Gooding had said something like that.

  Fabritus stepped over to his mother and took her arm. “Now. I can either drive you back to the airport, or I can show you the guest room we’ve prepared for you. Which will it be?”

  “I’m obviously not welcome.”

  “You are welcome,” Libby cut in. “And not because of the will or money. We’ve been hoping you’d come see us for months now. This invention can change the world, Andrea. Or unchange it. For the better. We’re at the beginning of something amazing here.”

  Fabritus gave Libby a quick smile over his shoulder. “So what will it be, Mother?”

  “The trip back would be tedious,” Andrea groused. “You do have a place I can lie down, don’t you? All that driving in circles was exhausting.”

  “Of course,” Fabritus said.

  He steered his mother off toward the hallway. As he passed Libby he whispered, “The house looks amazing. Find out where that salesman came from. I’d love to know what genius came up with the Normal compound.”

  “Anything for you,” Libby said.

  He gave her a quick kiss and hurried after his mother. She hadn’t seen him this excited since they’d cracked the equation for counter-balancing the vortex.

  Libby smiled and pulled the card out of her pocket.

  The word NORMAL was centered in bold, and beneath that, Gary Gooding’s name. But it was the small block of text in the corner that really drew her eye. A line listed the company founders. There were only two names on that list: Fabritus and Libby Plum.

  The company’s founding date was exactly one year from now.

  Impossible.

  Gary Gooding might have found a way to navigate the vortex to their front door, but she didn’t believe he had also traveled through time.

  “You’re a good salesman, Gary,” she said, “but even I’m not buying time travel.”

  Libby turned over the card and read the words written on the back in looping handwriting, in her handwriting.

  You don’t have to buy the truth! Surprise, Lib! Now get to work! —Libby Plum

  Impossible! Libby read the front and back again and again, something between laughter and disbelief
rolling through her.

  That was definitely her handwriting. And that was definitely a company she and Fibritus hadn’t founded yet — a company they hadn’t even dreamed up yet!

  Still, if she ever gained the ability reach through the vortexes to ensure the future success of their ventures, she knew she’d do it. Not for the money — just to see the surprise on Fabritus’s face.

  Impossible. Or maybe not. Everyone told them fixing the vortextual homes was impossible, and they’d done that, hadn’t they? Why stop there? Why not time travel and invent boxes of real, 100%, genuine Normal?

  Libby grinned, picked up the alarm clock, and tucked it under her arm.

  She’d wait until Fabritus got his mother settled down before showing him the card. And then, she and he would get busy dreaming up the plans for a new kind of normal.

  At the time I wrote this story, I was a mother of two young children, working during the day, writing at night, and caring for my grandmother who had Alzheimers. I felt a little like Tilly: always called upon to fix one more thing that was falling apart, but also enjoying the joy and quirks of life around me. Tilly’s world is a rich place that I hope to revisit some day.

  STITCHERY

  Tilly shaded her eyes with her hand and peered over at the house. The grandma was sitting on the second story window ledge, one bare foot rocking in the wind. Tilly had told her spring was a time of pastels and pinks, of fresh new things, but the grandma never paid her any mind. An endless trail of knitting spilled from her needles to the porch roof below, red as Christmas berries and as cheerfully out of season as the old girl herself.

  Tilly sighed. Ever since she’d found the grandma at the DMV, knitting up all the wasted time folks left behind, she’d wondered what to do with her. The DMV people had wanted to send her to an old folks home, but Tilly had stepped in and taken the grandma home instead. Anyone who had the patience to catch up loose seconds and save them for later deserved to be looked after, as far as Tilly was concerned, even if the old girl wasn’t in her right mind most the time.

  But then, most of Tilly’s good intentions made for bad decisions. She shook her head and caught sight of her own hand held up to the sun. Patchwork scars deep in her flesh showed like a crazy-work of seams beneath her skin. Ned never liked to look at her hand when she put a light behind it, and Tilly didn’t blame him. Normal folks stayed away from stitchery like her. As long as she didn’t talk to Ned about stitching, they got along fine. She liked having him around, enough that she was pretty sure she’d fallen in love with the man, even if she’d never come out and told him so.

  The beast beside her shifted and groaned, golden hooves sinking into the soft soil. Tilly looked down and tightened her grip on its halter.

  “Ned!” she hollered. “I need your help with the beast.” She stroked the poor thing’s neck and squinted at Ned’s boots which stuck out from under the old gray Chevy in front of the house. The grandma, two stories up, hummed and knitted.

  The beast lowered its head. Tilly stepped back. She’d secured half a tennis ball over its forehead nub with duct tape that wrapped around its jaw, but she wasn’t stupid enough to get in the way of the beast’s head. She’d seen it root up ant hills and such with that nub. Didn’t matter it was broke, it still worked.

  Clouds stretched across the sky, fizzled away and still Ned didn’t come out from under the truck. “Damn,” she whispered. She patted the beast’s neck a couple times and wondered what its coat really felt like. Ned had described it to her once, his hands being the ones he was born with and still full of feeling. He’d said the beast’s coat was as soft and silky as her copper-brown hair. Tilly smiled at the memory. That man had a way with words.

  “Ned! Now, ya hear?”

  “Yes, dear,” the grandma called back.

  “Not you, Granny. Ned.”

  “Really? I’m not sleepy. But if you say so.”

  Tilly caught sight of her easing back in through the window, then watched as she pulled the knitted scarf up and up like a red tongue. Tilly figured the grandma was making to come down to her.

  “No. You stay there!”

  And of course, that’s when Ned decided to scoot himself out from under the truck and show his heads.

  “Make up your mind,” Right Ned called out to her. Left Ned just grinned that hard grin of his around a strand of grass in his teeth.

  These were the kind of moments when she wished she’d never stopped work on that heat-seeking dung thrower.

  Tilly took a nice deep lungful of pollen-laden air, sneezed and let go of the beast’s halter while she wiped oil from her eyes. She hated her tears. Unlike Ned’s, or the grandma’s, hers were oily and smelled like hot sulphur. If she didn’t scrub them off right away, they left streaks down her freckled cheeks.

  Once Tilly could see straight again, she noticed the poor beast was even lower to the ground.

  She cleared her throat and put some volume in her voice. “Ned, get over here, both of you! And Granny, you stay right where you are. Just keep knitting. You’re doing fine.”

  The grandma poked her head out the window. A teasing wind lifted the white tendrils of her hair like dandelion down riding a child’s wish. She waved one hand, bracelets clinking. “I’ll be right there.”

  Tilly sighed. Best intentions and all that.

  Ned walked over to where she and the beast stood under the apple tree. He was wearing his clean overalls today, which meant he wasn’t thinking to get any real work done. Time to put another thought in those heads of his, she thought.

  “Ned, you know you’re my boyfriend, and I like you plenty, right?”

  Right Ned nodded. “I reckon, Tilly,” he said in that shy soft way that made her wish she’d rubbed off the stains beneath her eyes.

  “Then you know that sometimes I need help with things around the property.”

  Left Ned must have known where she was going, ’cause he made that here-we-go-again look.

  Tilly ignored him.

  “The beast is looking pretty poor and I’m not sure what it needs. My hands don’t work much for this, but yours should. Would you try and figure out what it wants?”

  “Tilly,” Right Ned said, “you know I gave up mingling with creatures when I gave up chew last winter.”

  “I know. And I know what it is, me asking this of you. But touching a mind isn’t as addicting as chew, is it? And you kicked that habit, right? I mean, I wouldn’t ask you to do it, but I just don’t have any ideas left.”

  As if she’d told it to do so, the beast dropped and lay on its side. It stretched its neck out and rolled its eyes, each breath an effort.

  Right Ned sighed, but Left Ned said, “You know I hate this, Til. You know I can’t ever do it just once.”

  She looked down at the beast to avoid Left Ned’s gaze. “If you have to, you could always mingle with me, Ned.” She waited a moment, but there wasn’t nothing but the sound of the beast’s labored breathing. Tilly felt heat pulse out from the center of her cheeks and she swore inwardly. No matter how hard she tried, she just never seemed to handle things right. Ned and she were lovers, but he never touched her mind, not even when he was in the fever grip of passion. She hadn’t asked him why, but figured it was her patchwork nature he took a dislike to. She swallowed once and tried again. “I mean if you’d want that.”

  “Tilly,” Right Ned said, his voice soft.

  “For the beast,” Tilly cut in. Mingling was his business, and if he preferred animal minds, then that’s the way it’d be. But there was no reason he should refuse to help the beast. “Please, Ned?”

  Right Ned looked down at the beast with something like sympathy in his eyes. Left Ned just glared at Tilly hard and long.

  Sometimes, Tilly thought, that man was a real pain.

  “Just to see what it wants,” Right Ned said.

  Tilly nodded and Ned kneeled down. He held his hands above the beast’s dirty white flanks.

  Tilly watched, like she used to wa
y back in his circus days, while Ned finally got his heads together, closed both sets of eyes and placed his palms on the once snowy-white side of the beast. Ned stiffened. He lifted up off of his heels a bit, then his whole body slumped.

  Tilly bit her lip and waited. She knew it’d been a long time since he’d done this, and she hoped she was right about him not getting stuck mind-to-mind cozy with the ailing beast.

  That’s what had ended his days in the circus. He’d mingled with the ringmaster’s daughter, and made her scream. The girl accused him of being dirty, illegal, patchwork, but Tilly knew none of that was true. When Ned was born, his mama didn’t let doctors change the way he looked. Ned, all both of him, was more natural than most folks, certainly more than Tilly.

  Ned still didn’t move. His heads were bent so low, if she caught him from a side-view, she’d think he only had one head. His shoulders were hunched, soul-sensing fingers spread wide and palm-tight against the beast.

  “Too hard,” both Neds said, and Tilly shivered despite the warm air. When those boys worked in unison, it gave her the creeps.

  The beast grunted, but it seemed each breath took just a little longer getting to.

  “Warm, sunlit fields and soft, untouched laps. Home.” Right Ned looked up at her, tears caught on his girl-pretty lashes. “Tilly, the beast wants to die.”

  “No,” she said shaking her head. This had been the first beast she’d taken in, back when Mother and Father had left her to tend the property and all the souls within. It couldn’t be old enough to die. “You’re wrong, Ned,” she said.

  But Right Ned had closed his eyes again, bent toward the beast like his ears were in his palms.

  Left Ned stared at her. She knew that look. It was the same one he used when the Sheriff had tried to take him to the medical research center back when he was just a little boy.

  “You check again,” she said. “Tell it we fenced the back field and the grass is plenty sweet, sweeter than those crazy dreams it’s having. Tell it there’s no reason to die.”

  “There’s no time left for it, Til,” Left Ned said. “Belly-wailing isn’t gonna change anything.”